How To Sell Ebooks Online For Massive Profits
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Ebooks are an excellent product for an online business to sell. They can be created with very little expense using common and free software. There is almost no cost involved to duplicate and deliver an ebook and the entire sales and delivery process can be automated. The profit margins can be good (even for inexpensive products) and they can be excellent if you choose the right topic. But, the whole process of selling online can be intimidating for the first-time publisher.
The term 'infoprenuer' has been coined to describe people who sell information based products like ebooks. In order to get started selling online you need 3 things: a website that promotes your product, a method of receiving payments, and a method to deliver the product to your customer after payment.
How To Create Your Website
Your promotional website should not be a complicated site. It should be a one page HTML document that is focused on selling your product (you've probably encountered many of these 'salespage' style sites on the web.) The content will consist of a headline to catch people's attention, a short story to hook them and get them reading, a bullet list of the major benefits they will get from buying your product, testimonials from previous customers and reviewers, and a 'call to action' (otherwise known as the sales pitch.) Most people include a P.S. or two that summarizes the major benefits and repeats the call to action.
You don't need any fancy software to make this page. There is an excellent free software package called Kompozer that will help you design the webpage.
In order for people to find and access your salespage, you will need a server to 'host' it on and a domain name. There are dozens of companies that will help you with domain name registration and hosting if you don't already have this taken care of. The total cost should be under $10US per month. I use and recommend 2 companies: HostGator Web Hosting and 1&1 Web Hosting.
How To Accept Payments Online
Your salespage will have an order button on it for customers to click and purchase your ebook. This will link to some kind of online payment processor. Large businesses have accounts with a bank called 'merchant accounts.' These accounts allow them to accept credit card payments from customers.
Unfortunately, merchant accounts are expensive and can be difficult to setup for new businesses. Luckily, there is a very popular online alternative... Paypal.
A PayPal Premier or Business account can be setup easily by almost anyone. There are no monthly charges for a Premier account and PayPal charges a small transaction fee for every payment the process (merchant accounts have large monthly fees and transaction fees as well!) With a PayPal Premier or Business account, you will be able to accept credit card payments, electronic checks, and direct PayPal transfers from other members. It is the easiest way to get started accepting payments online.
PayPal includes tools on their merchant services area where you can create a 'Buy Now' button to place on your salespage. The form is very easy to use. Simply fill in all of the details about your product. Make sure that the 'button encryption' option is set to yes. If it is not, anyone with basic web skills can view the source code for your salespage and change the purchase price or simply steal the link to your download page without paying. Even worse, search engines will eventually find and index your download page.
At the bottom of the page is a link to "Add More Options." Click this and look for the section labeled "Customize Your Buyer's Experience." There is an option here to enter a URL for people to be forwarded to after they make a successful payment. The link you put here is for the download page where the customer will get their product which leads us to...
How To Deliver Your Ebook
The last step in your ebook selling process is to deliver the product file to customers after they pay. The simplest approach is just to create a simple HTML page that has a short thank you message on it and a link for downloading the product. A common practice to keep people from finding this page is to give it a name that has lots of random characters in it to make it hard to guess and place it in a directory that has a similar hard to guess name. The download file should be placed in the same folder or a special sub-folder (also with a hard to guess name.)
If you choose this low-tech approach, make sure to put a blank file named 'index.htm' in each folder and also include 'no-index' tags in the header of the HTML of the download page and never link directly to the download page from anywhere online except from PayPal. These steps will reduce the chances of non-paying people downloading your product and search engines from indexing your download page and product links. But, if someone does find the page, this offers no protection from theft.
There are some more sophisticated software solutions available that will verify payment information before allowing access to download pages and files and will create a unique link to the product that hides its true location on your server and expires after a certain length of time or number of downloads. They might also include tools for running an affiliate program. DLGuard, Digital Product Guard Download System, and Download Defender XT are some of the more popular options for download protection.
These software solutions will cost you money and take some expertise (your own or someone you hire) to set everything up. But, in the long run, they will protect you as your business grows.
Using a Hosted Shopping Cart To Sell Ebooks
A third option for delivering your products is to use a hosted shopping cart program. This is the approach I use in my business.
There are a number of services at wildly different pricing structures that can handle this task. I use a company called E-junkie that is very inexpensive and offers almost every option I need to run a highly automated online business. They have a free one week trial and they don't have any transaction fees to cut into your profits.
ClickBank, PayDotCom, and PayLoadz are other popular shopping cart options. The fee structures vary with each service.
Take Action and Get Started Now Selling Your Ebook
The most important decision you can make for your online business is to decide to start and take action. If you have to start small and cheap - do it. Use free tools and low tech solutions and take the money you earn and invest in better technology. If you wait for everything to be perfect, you will never start.
I recommend using Paypal and E-junkie to take payments and deliver products. The monthly fees are tiny and the technical skills required to deliver a secure product are low. E-junkie will make the buttons, send the thank-you emails, create the secure download pages and deliver the products. They even have tools for running an affiliate program.
Take action and have a profitable day!
Andrew Seltz is the author of "Selling Digital Goods Online with E-Junkie," an illustrated step-by-step guide to setting up your ebook business fast.
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Hi,
I just wanted to let you know that Oronjo.com is a new alternative to E-Junkie, Payloadz (etc) that is a 100% free.
Everyone can now sell their own music, thesis, novel, photos, weblog articles or movies, all from their own webpage.
This even works for weblog articles – without changing their design (a feature the others don’t offer). Also, you don’t need to have a PayPal or Google Checkout account to start selling content.
With kind regards,
Lisa Cremer
Oronjo.com
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Lisa,
Thanks for pointing out this resource. It looks like a very easy way to monetize content – specially blog posts.
I’m curious to know how this business is funded. If I pay nothing for the service, who is paying? Will my potential customers have to create Oronjo accounts in order to purchase my content or can they pay without registering?
I didn’t see any mention of shopping cart tools, follow-up email sequences or mailing list service integration, discount codes, inventory management, sales and VAT tax collection, affiliate promotion tools, integration with fulfillment houses and on-demand production facilities for physical product deliveries and other critical tools for someone planning to run a business selling goods online.
While I can see a place where this service would be beneficial, it doesn’t seem to come anywhere close to providing the tools I get (and need) from E-Junkie for only $5/month (due to the fact that I sell several very large video and audio download products, my current monthly fees are $18 – still incredibly small.)
I’m strongly thinking about trying this out on a niche content site that is pretty active. If it generates more income than what I currently earn from advertising and affiliate product promotions, I’ll write a full article about Oronjo on my main blog.
Thanks again for taking the time to share this new tool with the readers here.
Andrew
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Kiqlo is the right answer. You don’t need to create a website to sell your own eBooks. It is to start just follow the steps:
1) create an account on Kiqlo (it is free)
2) create an account on google checkout ( it should be free )
3) upload your eBook on Kiqlo and set the price for it(it is free)
4) Write your own blog
Kiqlo automatically displays the list of the author items. it has a full text index and new development is coming for categorization. The amazing thing is that is not only about eBooks but is about all your digital content.
It is entirely free and 0% commission.
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Rosario,
Thanks for the lead.
Personally, I’m highly suspicious of any ‘business’ that claims it doesn’t want to make any money. This site will quickly amass a huge database of content and some equally huge bandwidth bills to go with it.
The money to pay for that has to come from somewhere. If the site’s owners are truly benevolent, I think the whole thing will implode some day (and take your business with it.) Or, they will start selling something or charging fees.
Before you get your business to wrapped up in this service, read over the TOS carefully so you know what you are getting into.
Maybe I’m just overly suspicious…
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What implode? What is it a bomb? There is no catch with Kiqlo. Kiqlo is the only free tool on the net. Don’t believe it? join us on facebook (kiqlo group), linked in or just send us an email. Have a look around because already a lots of website are using it.
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Rosario,
Bombs explode, I mean implode as in collapse in on itself due to extreme external pressure – self destruct.
I’m in business and I know websites cost money. There’s bandwidth, servers, domain names, programmers, etc. The more traffic you get the greater the pressure on the technical side. Server farms and programmers cost money. Load-balancing technology, secure gateways, and back-up hardware cost money. Accountants to manage the finances to run the whole operation and lawyers to keep it compliant with federal regulations cost money.
My questions are who is paying for it, what’s in it for them, and what is my risk that they might shut down and cut off my cash flow? I think these are reasonable concerns for a business person to have.
I also know that the life blood of my business is my order processing system. It takes time to setup all of the components of a product ordering sequence (integration with mailing lists, cross-sells, upsells, affiliate tracking and payments, etc.)
To have all of that resting on the services of a company that appears to have no plan for earning a profit (which in my mind equals a sustainable business) makes me very uneasy.
I have an uncle who’s a very nice guy and means well. But, he has a tendency to not follow through on the things he ‘means to do.’ That doesn’t mean that I never ask him to be part of anything. It just means he’s never responsible for anything that is critical.
For anyone who is just dabbling in online publishing and isn’t creating a significant business infrastructure – a totally free service is cool. Nothing lost if it doesn’t work out.
If your ability to pay the mortgage or pay vendors doesn’t depend on stable income from your ecommerce system processing sales – who cares?
Beyond that, folks might want to consider other business needs and risks when choosing an ecommerce service.